Rubber has various applications like, for vehicle tires and conveyor belts, shock absorbers and anti-vibration mountings, pipes, and hoses, etc. It also serves some other specialistic applications such as in pump housings and pipes for handling of abrasive sludges, power transmission belting, diving gear, water lubricated bearings. etc. The general raw materials that make up these products are natural and synthetic rubbers, carbon, nylon or polyester cord, sulphur, resins and oil. These raw materials are virtually vulcanized into one compound (rubber) that is not easily broken down and makes it highly durable. This property of high durability makes the disposal of waste rubber an even more serious environmental problem as land filling is the most used disposal route.
However, concerns about conserving resources and energy have seen an increasing opposition to landfilling. Also, public sanitation and municipal waste management is often ineffective in developing countries and scrap tires are often found littering the streets. Rubber recovery can be a difficult process. There are many reasons, however Why waste rubber should be reclaimed or recovered or converted to value added products. It conserves non-renewable petroleum products, which are used to produce synthetic rubbers. If tires are incinerated to reclaim embodied energy then they can yield substantial quantities of useful power. However, such a recovery of waste rubber requires high operating costs and also the amount of rubber that is recovered is substantially low.
The problems of waste rubber can't be solved by landfilling or incineration, because rubber takes decades to decompose and causes land pollution and incineration increases the emission of harmful greenhouse gases, e.g., COx, NOx, SOx and etc.
Rubber recycling is carried out by pyrolysis and/or chemical treatments for recovery of various raw materials from composite rubber, but most of these processes produce significant amount of C1-C5 gases or low molecular weight hydrocarbon liquids that are not suitable for automobile fuel oil.
There is, therefore, felt a need for a process for converting the value-eroded material (rubber) into a valuable product like crude or automobile fuel.